The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  George flew fifty-eight missions before his honorable discharge in December 1944, an admirable record for one of the Navy’s youngest pilots. He returned home a war hero.

  No one ever questioned his actions about bailing out over Chichi-Jima until he ran for President in 1992 and berated his opponent, Bill Clinton, for avoiding military service. By then many in George’s squadron had died, but Chester Mierzejewski, the eyewitness to that flight in 1944, took issue with what he saw as discrepancies in George’s story. Mierzejewski said he was disturbed after hearing George say on television—during the 1992 campaign—that he had nearly died when his plane was shot because his wings caught on fire and the cockpit erupted in flames.

  Mierzejewski wrote to George that these recollections were “entirely different from my recall of the incident . . . I would not want someone who is not for your candidacy to stand up in public and dispute what you say.”

  George, who was known as a constant and compulsive correspondent, writing notes to everyone he had ever met, never answered Mierzejewski’s letter. Months later, the turret gunner went public with his recollections in the New York Post, disputing the assertion that there were two parachutes. Mierzejewski maintained that only one man got out of the plane and that was the pilot. “I was hoping I would see some other parachutes,” he said. “I never did. I saw the plane go down. I knew the guys were still in it. It was a helpless feeling.”

  He again contradicted George’s claim about the plane and the cockpit being on fire. Mierzejewski, who won a Distinguished Flying Cross, was a hundred feet away from George’s plane at the time and was able to see into the cockpit. He said he remembered only “a puff of smoke” that quickly dissipated. “This guy is just not telling the truth,” he said. “His plane was never on fire,” and “no smoke came out of his cockpit when he opened his canopy to bail out.”

  Others on the same bombing mission had different recollections. Milton Moore, who was George’s wingman and the pilot of Mierzejewski’s plane, made the same bombing run after George. “He got hit and went on in, smoking,” Moore said. “I pulled up to him, then he lost power and I went sailing by.” Don Melvin, the squadron commander, speculated that a shell must have hit an oil line on George’s plane. “You could have seen the smoke for 100 miles,” he recalled.

  Smoke is a critical issue in this story. If a pilot’s plane was not on fire, he was trained to make a water landing in order to put his crew in a better position for rescue. George had not done that. He bailed instead.

  “I think he could have saved those lives, if they were alive,” said Mierzejewski. “I don’t know that they were, but at least they had a chance if he had attempted a water landing.”

  Mierzejewski’s account appeared in the newspaper under a blaring headline: “War Buddy Disputes Bush Bailout Tale.” George was incensed by the implication that his youthful panic had caused the death of his crewmen. He immediately released the intelligence report of the 1944 mission to rebut the gunner’s story. Reporters followed up, interviewing the few surviving members of his VT-51 squadron for their recollections. There was no rush to judgment on the part of anyone who served with George Bush, only a reluctance to return to the war to replay that tragic incident. Some expressed regret, disappointment, and sadness over the loss of George’s crew, but each accepted the finality of the judgment George had made and the actions that ensued in the cyclone of war.

  “I don’t know . . . until you’ve been there, you can’t . . . you know you’ve got conjecture a mile long,” said Legare R. Hole, a pilot who was executive officer of George’s squadron.

  “We were just hurt,” said Wendell Tomes, a radioman and tail gunner in the squadron. “Delaney got killed, and I don’t think he had a chance to bail out, to come out safely. I was hurt by it because he was a good friend of mine, a good friend of everybody on the ship . . . At the time I’d have preferred [that George make a water landing] but he had to make the decision. He was as scared as the rest of us, so he had to do what he thought best.”

  By the time George returned to his ship in November 1944, U.S. planes had bombed Berlin, the Marines had established footholds in the Marshalls and Marianas in the Pacific, and General Douglas MacArthur had returned to the Philippines after the United States inflicted heavy damage on the Japanese at the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

  At home, Franklin Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented fourth term as President with Harry S. Truman as his running mate. This was too much for rabid Roosevelt haters like the Walkers and Bushes, who threw themselves into the Republican campaign of their friend Thomas Dewey, the forty-two-year-old prosecuting attorney of New York.

  George wrote, “I think most feel FDR will win, but then most of the people I know around here [officers] seem to be Dewey voters. The southern boys will support Roosevelt. The ones I’ve talked with seem to think he’s some sort of a god—I don’t believe they look too closely at what the New Deal administration has done or has not done.”

  Despite FDR’s declining health, the sixty-two-year-old President was the most experienced politician in U.S. history, and the country felt safer with him at the helm than with his opponent, who kept haranguing about the dangers of Communism. With Russia as a U.S. ally against Hitler in 1944, Dewey’s Red-baiting didn’t make sense. Roosevelt won with 54 percent of the vote.

  “I know how discouraged you must be,” George wrote to his parents, “and I feel the same way. My knowledge of the campaign etc. is not extensive but from all reports it was not a pleasant one.”

  When President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, Prescott wrote to his friend Samuel Merrifield Bemiss in Richmond, Virginia:

  The death of the President has been no doubt a source of much discussion in Richmond—or has it? I have been amazed at the lack of interest in it here, or in Pinehurst, or on the trains, or in New Haven. Aside from surprise, no emotion have I seen, and I have sought it out. I hesitate to express my true thoughts concerning his passing for my respect for the office is very great—but my respect for F.D.R. as the occupant was sorely lacking. But we need not go into that, I suppose. I am not worried about Truman at all; in fact, I think he will do an acceptable job, take good advice, use his cabinet well, work closely with Congress, and make good appointments. I have no fears on the international front. I think Churchill and Stalin had the “high sign” on F.D.R. but will not have it on Truman because Truman will lean on his State Department and Senate very heavily.

  In November 1944, the thought of four more years of Roosevelt had thrown the Bushes into a torpor of depression, but by Christmas their spirits had begun to soar as they looked forward to the weddings of their two oldest sons. Prescott seemed especially impressed that his namesake son was marrying an admiral’s daughter. In a letter to Averell Harriman he wrote:

  You may be interested to know that our son, Prescott, Jr., is to marry a young lady named Betty Lou Kauffman, daughter of Vice Admiral Kauffman, Commander of Destroyers in the Pacific, and one of the top men in the Nimitz organization. This young lady is a very lovely person and we are perfectly delighted over the engagement. We have never met the Admiral, who I understand has a very fine record in the Navy, but we have met Mrs. Kauffman and the daughter.

  There was no such letter from Prescott extolling George’s fiancée, Barbara Pierce, whose father had not yet worked his way to the top of the corporate ladder at McCall Corporation. At the time Marvin Pierce was only a company vice president, which was not as prestigious as the admiralty. His wife, Pauline Pierce, the daughter of an Ohio Supreme Court justice, was every inch the snob that Prescott Bush was. She felt that her daughter should be marrying better, if for no other reason than to enhance Pauline’s position in the Garden Club of America. (In a letter to a friend, Marvin described his wife’s garden club as “an association of the snottiest outfits engaged in that sort of work.” Yet he understood how much his wife loved having her picture appear in the New York society pages whenever she won a medal in the inte
rnational flower show, especially for her expertise in pollinating lilies.) Pauline spent her husband’s modest income as if they were rich, and rarely paid her bills, which forced him into continual debt. At one point the family’s liabilities were so dire that Marvin had to take a $100,000 loan ($1.05 million in 2004) from his McCall’s stock. That loan took him years to repay.

  When Barbara was growing up, Rye was a Social Register community of affluent families in Westchester County, but the Pierces were neither Social Register nor affluent. Pauline Pierce, who wanted very much to be part of “society,” scrambled to keep up, but she was never asked to join the Junior League and her daughters were never chosen to be debutantes. She dismissed the Bushes as a nice enough family, but not as nice (that is, wealthy) as she’d like, and she pronounced George singularly unimpressive, especially when she compared him with Walter Rafferty, the Marine captain whom her pretty daughter, Martha, had married.

  “Father appreciated George,” said Barbara. “Mother did not.”

  Still, Pauline insisted that Barbara have a proper Christmas wedding with eight attendants in emerald green satin and matching satin shoes, an extravagance almost unheard of during war-rationing years. After a year and a half at Smith, Barbara had dropped out of college, where classmates remember her daydreaming through classes and doodling her name in notebooks as “Mrs. George Herbert Walker Bush.” She returned home to help her mother plan the wedding and the reception for three hundred guests at the Apawamis Country Club. Pauline ordered engraved invitations for December 17, 1944, but Barbara had to scratch out that date and write in a new one when George did not get home until December 24. That social faux pas only further exasperated his future mother-in-law.

  At the last minute, George’s seventy-year-old grandmother, Loulie Walker, was unable to attend the wedding. She had been thrown from a horse and broken her hip. Pauline Pierce could hardly believe someone that age would still be horseback riding.

  On January 6, 1945, Barbara appeared in a long white satin gown and a veil of rose point lace that belonged to Dorothy Walker Bush. She walked down the aisle of the Rye Presbyterian Church on her father’s arm to marry Lieutenant Junior Grade George Herbert Walker Bush, who stood at the altar in his Navy dress blues, complete with his mother’s gift of gold wings and his father’s cuff links.

  The young couple, who had met as teenagers and found refuge in each other, were overjoyed to be starting a new life together. They could hardly wait to get away from home and their overbearing parents, particularly her imperious mother and his magisterial father.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Prescott Bush wanted to make sure that Yale knew his boy was coming. With the largest freshman class enrolled to date—1,172 men in 1945, including 800 veterans on the GI Bill—Prescott didn’t want George to get lost in the shuffle. So he wrote a letter to Charles Seymour, president of the university, on October 11, 1945, and suggested they have lunch the next day. At the time Prescott was a member of the Yale Corporation, which is to the university what the College of Cardinals is to the Vatican. So his “Dear Charlie” letter packed a punch:

  I called your office this morning and in your absence left word with your secretary that I hoped very much that you could have lunch at Mory’s at one thirty with Brig. Gen. Charles M. Spofford (Yale 1924), and myself tomorrow. Chuck and my son, George, who has just gotten out of the Navy after more than three years of service in naval aviation, are going to play golf in the morning at the Yale golf course, and I have set one thirty so as to be sure we will not keep you waiting.

  Just to make sure that the university president got the point, Prescott added: “I will also bring my son, George, to lunch. He left Andover in June 1942 and went directly in the Navy on his eighteenth birthday. Now, at twenty-one and a half years, he is married and entering Yale on November 1st in the special school for return[ing] servicemen.”

  Not only was Prescott a member of the revered Yale Corporation, but he served on every committee that had to do with the securing and expenditure of funds. In addition, he had undertaken the university’s $80 million expansion drive. So he was not a man to be ignored by the university’s president. Despite the last-minute invitation, Seymour joined Prescott and his party for lunch the next day. (Research in the Yale archives shows that no other incoming freshman in that class was accorded such preferential treatment.) George Herbert Walker Bush was off to a roaring start.

  Even twenty-eight years after his graduation from Yale, Prescott continued to be a huge presence on campus. “You could not not meet Prescott Bush if you stayed at Yale at all,” said the former English professor George de Forest Lord. “He often was coming to sing with the Whiffenpoofs. He was very enthusiastic about the college, dedicated, and clearly influenced by the Yale milieu and Yale spirit, an old-fashioned Yale man—a gentleman.”

  If Prescott was a big dog on the Yale campus, George was a little puppy who slipped his leash, wagged his tail, and ran in all directions. By the time he graduated two and a half years later (he went to school year-round with no breaks to achieve this accelerated schedule) with a bachelor’s degree in economics, and a minor in sociology, Poppy Bush, as he had resumed calling himself after the Navy, had gobbled all that Yale had to offer—socially, scholastically, and athletically.

  He tried to emulate all of his father’s achievements but fell short around the piano. “Poppy couldn’t sing worth a damn—no pitch, bad voice, and completely tone-deaf,” said a family friend. “When he tried to sing, dogs went deaf. Pres’s other kids had great voices. Pres junior and Johnny and Bucky were all Whiffenpoofs at Yale, and Nancy starred in some of her college musicals. In fact, she and her father composed most of the songs for Raisin’ the Deuce, her Vassar Soph Party show. Thank God, Pop was a good athlete. Otherwise, Prescott might’ve put him up for adoption.”

  “Anybody that’s interested in Bush has got to focus on that wonderful combination of scholar-athlete that he proved to be,” said former Ohio Congressman Thomas “Lud” Ashley, a Yale classmate and one of George’s best friends. “In fact, he wasn’t anything particularly special . . . but he was special in that he was a good student and an even better athlete, I’d say. Baseball and soccer. He went out for soccer, and by the end of the first week he was on the varsity soccer team. He was a very gifted athlete.”

  The postwar years at Yale were unusual because the campus was crowded with veterans on the GI Bill, many of whom were married and in a hurry to get their degree. A college diploma meant a good job, and these men wanted to get out and make a living, so they wasted no time on campus fripperies or the bright sparkles of youth. They hunkered down to studying, made good grades, and became the hardest-working, most serious students that colleges had ever seen. The Yale Class Book of 1948 noted: “An interesting change [on campus] was the size of the Dean’s Lists which went up in much greater proportion than the size of the student body.” The New York Times reported the trend in colleges across the country: “The GIs are hogging the honor rolls and the Dean’s lists.”

  And that included George Herbert Walker Bush. Despite his lackluster grades at Andover, he surprised everyone by placing in the top 10 percent of his college class and graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He also won the Francis Gordon Brown Prize, which is awarded to the member of the junior class who most closely approaches the standard of intellectual ability, character, capacity for leadership, and service to the university set by the Yale alumnus Francis Gordon Brown. “I think in practice the prize is awarded to an athlete who has a reasonably good grade point average,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, a Yale historian.

  George, a two-letter man, qualified on both scores. Batting right and throwing left, he was a natural first baseman who tried to play like his idol, Lou Gehrig. “Nothing flashy, no hot-dogging, the ideal sportsman,” George said of the Yankees’ legendary first baseman. “He could field, hit, hit-with-power, and come through in the clutch.”

  When George was named captain of the 1948 baseball team,
the Yale Daily News said: “He is generally considered as one of the flashiest fielding first basemen in collegiate circles.” His teammates agreed. “The key thing about Poppy, as everyone called him, was that he was so sure-gloved,” said Frank “Junie” O’Brien. “All the infielders knew that if they threw the ball anywhere near him, he was going to pull it in.”

  George was not as impressive at bat. Known as “Good Glove, No Hit,” he had a .239 batting average in 1947; the next year he raised it to .264, but he was never good enough to be scouted by the pros like Frank Quinn, a pitcher on the team, who was signed by the Red Sox for a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus. George helped Yale win the NCAA Eastern Championships in the first two years of the College World Series—1947 and 1948—but Yale lost both series in the finals.

  George’s Uncle Herbie, who idolized his nephew and held him up as a model to his two sons, attended every baseball game George played from the middle of February to the end of June. The entire Bush-Walker family turned out on June 5, 1948, for the big Princeton game in New Haven, and the Bambino himself presented the typescript of his autobiography, The Babe Ruth Story, to the captain of the Yale baseball team for the Yale library.

  “When Ruth turned the manuscript over to me, his hand trembled and his voice could barely be heard,” George recalled in his autobiography. “It was obvious that he was dying of cancer; but some of the young, free-spirited ‘Babe’ was still there, very much alive. ‘You know,’ he said, winking, ‘when you write a book like this, you can’t put everything in it.’ The ceremony was one of his last public appearances.”